Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius 1535 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
@dogged
I seem to recall that Microsoft, or the US Government, once disabled the Windows machines owned by whichever wicked government was wickedly ruling Afghanistan in those wicked times.
True, MS are unlikely to bother a private individual who keeps himself inconspicuous, but corporations are another matter.
@Grikath
Yes, yes, but then you look at the alternatives, of which the most important is the European Parliament.
There, one votes for a party list. There is no way of voting against a particular candidate unless you also vote against his or her colleagues. Voting against is a very important facility.
@John H Woods
The newspapers are allowed to be biased, and they are generally honest about their bias. The BBC is supposed to be not biased, and therefore hides its bias.
BBC election night began at 9.55pm, and for a few minutes they were relishing the prospect of a Labour coalition. Then they were stunned by the exit poll, and more or less behaved themselves.
However, in 1992 they did not admit until the following morning that the Conservatives had actually achieved a majority of parliamentary seats. Same again this time.
@boltar
Yes.
The very early universe went through an "inflationary" phase, when everything was smoothed out: the geometry, and the distribution of photons and other particles.
The reported temperature deviation is about four standard deviations, so is worth investigating.
@boltar and generally,
What puzzled the people who before ca 1930 speculated on the origin of life on Earth was, how could life get started in an oxidising environment?
Then astronomers realised the universe was mostly hydrogen - had to be to explain our sun - and people realised that life here began in a reducing or at least neutral environment.
I cannot see how any kind of life could survive a perchlorate environment, unless it is at most a trace component.
Apols in advance for tips & corrections in these comments, but my email is down while I rebuild my main computer. But, as others have said, interesting article.
1. "The breakthrough was his measurement of the speed of electromagnetism".
It was not a measurement but a prediction: a formula based on known electromagentic constants, arising from his equations.
2. "(Principle's) daughter". No, principal's.
It seems that Team Register had an energetic lunch the other day. The hot curry was descending from the entrance aperture to the exit, but was countered by violent body movements and got into some kind of oscillation. No amount of beer could cool it down, but the beer made them start thinking.
More likely is that the ship will hit a speck of galactic dust, perhaps one micron across. So 10**-18 cubic metres, or ca 10**-15 kg. The rest mass energy is therefore 90 joules, so its kinetic energy at relativistic speeds will be similar.
Suppose there is one such dust grain per cubic metre. At the speed of light, each square metre of the ship will hit 3x10**8 such grains, releasing at least 2x10**10 joules.
The ship will rapidly be reduced to galactic dust.
Why use BCD?
Answer, there were no 64-bit computers in those days. Few people had a 60-bit CDC6600.
24-bit was common, allowing +or- 8 million. 36 bit would give +or- 32 billion.
What we did have were COBOL compilers allowing very large numbers to be specified. But to compute them efficiently BCD was the way.
The IBM 1620 I once programmed used binary coded decimal arithmetic. That meant one could manipulate very long numbers. I used it to calculate pi to 300 places.
Part of that calculation involved finding the square root of three to 300 places, which entailed a loop in which a 600 place number was divided by a 300 place number. A single hardware divide instruction took about one second to do that, as shown by the flashing lights.
The real use of BCD is in finance, to represent billions of dollars to the nearest cent without rounding errors for simple addition and subtraction. Percentages and currency conversions still have to be rounded, of course. VAX computers included BCD instructions for use with their COBOL compilers and variables of type COMPUTATIONAL.
Nowadays this long-length arithmetic would be useful for cryptography.
Dr Anderson: "advances made by scientists might take twenty years before appearing in the market".
Consider the transistor, invented in 1948. It did not show its full importance until the late 1960s when integrated circuits became available. But the quantum mechanics that underlies the transistor was developed in the 1920s.
So that was a gap of some forty years between scientific research and major pay-off. The moral is that a short term approach to science funding will not spend money wisely.
@croc
No, They are are not concerned with you as an individual; you are just a statistic.
What They are interested in is statistics by the million, just like the ad agencies and supermarkets look at the millions. Snowden has said little or nothing about Big Statistics. Maybe he is not a statistician, or maybe that is where the real secrets are.
The Heartbleed bug was not a subtle cryptography error but poor interface design, with two variables representing block size. Even if both variables were desirable, there should have been an 'assert'.
So we may need a redesign rather than a review. Also a zero-tolerance policy for compiler warnings.
Point 1.
So the oil drop system he describes behaves like a quantum system. This means that somewhere, quantum indeterminacy, aka the uncertainty principle, has been introduced. The article says this is the result of the wide area forcing field.
Presumably, then, this can be modelled on classical computers.
Point 2.
Surely what he calls the "failure of quantim computing" is actually the technical difficulty of mustering enough qubits with current technology. This does not sound like a failure in principle.
I loathe those websites that automatically refresh their web page every two minutes or so. Specifically the Daily Telegraph with its front page and section header pages. I am reading the teaser line below the headline and it refreshes, slowly. I am about to click on a headline to go to the full story and it refreshes, slowly. I have complained but have been ignored.
Sure, I want an up to date page when I click on it. But when I've got it, I actually want to READ it, an idea that seems alien to the Telegraph's web department. No, I do not want to spend all day looking at glitzy moving adverts, changed every two minutes.
Lets hope El Reg remains a site that is good to read.
I gather computer scientists have proved that it is impossible to write a program that will accurately recognise another program as a virus - some kind of extension to Turing's Halting Theorem.
I conjecture (like a mathematician; scientists hypothesise) that it is equally impossible to recognise every kind of lying.
I do most of my proofing with MS Word. Shows you the typos and many other simple mistakes. Red squiggles, green squiggles, and blue squiggles make a colourful/colorful day. You don't have yo agree with all of them.
But can El Reg afford MS Word, or are they as impoverished as the BOFH company and their z-mail (retarded email)?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
